From Scotland, where Adam Smith pioneered systematic thinking about
economics, comes an adjective, “carnaptious,” that fits people who
are allergic to economic euphoria. It means cantankerous. Let’s
think carnaptiously about this fact: The interest rate on ten-year
Treasury bonds recently rose briefly to 3 percent, and soon may move
above this. This is more than evidence of the economy’s strength. It
also is a harbinger of a coming day when the great driver of the
national debt will be . . . the national debt. Pour a Scotch and
read on.

The economy’s growth, which slowed in 2018’s first quarter, is not brisk; it still is not even the 3 percent that is the low end of presidential boasting. At the end of this month, the economy will amble into the tenth year of the expansion that began in June 2009. This month is its 108th, making it almost twice as long as the average expansion (58 months) since 1945. Unless Mr. I Alone Can Fix It has banished the business cycle forever — modesty would not have prevented him from mentioning this — a contraction is somewhere in America’s future. It might begin in fiscal conditions resembling today’s because this is now normal: trillion-dollar annual budget deficits while the economy is at full employment. (The 3.9 percent unemployment rate is impressive, even give the decades-long decline in the work-force-participation rate, which today is 62.8 percent.)

The upcoming elections don't augur well for restoring fiscal sanity,
either. But maybe a miracle will happen.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this week finally
released long awaited proposed
rules for labeling genetically modified foods, or GMOs. But for
the last year or so, it seemed like these rules would never come up
for public discussion.

Baylen notes that Act is "a bad law, and likely unworkable."
Unsurprising, given
Wikipedia
description of its sausage-making legislative history
(references elided):

Public Law 114-216 was passed after previous attempts to
introduce a national GMO labeling bill had failed. It was
fast-tracked without debate or committee review.
The original bill S.
764 - “A bill to reauthorize and amend the National Sea Grant
College Program Act, and for other purposes” - had nothing to do
with food and stalled after having passed the Senate. Hollowed out
of its content it was replaced with a bill to defund
This bill was then replaced with a bill creating to outlaw
state-level GMO labeling and setting a voluntary GMO labeling
bill.
When this bill failed,
the S. 764 husk was used to rush through the present bill, just in
time before the Vermont GMO food labeling requirement would have
been activated on July 1.

Activists are upset that the law limits their ability to scare
the crap out of consumers about GMOs.

One of the most successful new media outlets in America does nothing
but publish fake news. If that seems like a bad thing, it should be
noted that the website in question is even more dedicated to
spreading the Good News. Adam Ford, the founder and only full-time
employee of theBabylon
Bee, a Christian satire website, is clearly surprised at his
success. “On the first of March, we celebrated two years in
existence, and a couple of days later I noticed we had passed 100
million page views,” Ford tells The Weekly Standard. The Bee’s social
media presence—it now has over 400,000 followers on Facebook and
nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter—has grown quickly too. “All of
this was totally organic. We’ve never run an ad, never boosted a
post, never spent a dollar on spreading the word. And we’ve had no
outside funding. Our growth has been totally driven by the
content.”

If you’re one of the shrinking number of people to have never encountered an article from the Babylon Bee, the publication could be described as something like a Christian (largely Protestant) version of the Onion. With such headlines as “Treasure In Heaven Revealed To Be Bitcoin,” “Satan Sprinkles A Few More Stegosaurus Bones Across Nation To Test Christians’ Faith,” and “Opinion: My God Is An Imaginary Deification Of My Idiotic And Contradictory Personal Opinions,” you can see where the site gets some of its conceptual inspiration.

Particularly amusing is the obliviousness of fact-checking sites
like Snopes, who rated the story “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”
as false.

So I was looking for documentation about my iPod's "shuffle"
algorithm. Is it really random? I didn't find that, but LifeHacker
apparently thought my interest indicated that I might find their
video useful:
Watch This If You Get Too
High:

Gee, thanks, I guess. Spoiler: drink some water, get fresh air,
watch some undemanding sitcoms. Which is pretty much what I do
anyway. Dude.

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